To increase the roll stiffness of motor vehicles, roll or body roll stabilizers are generally used. These stabilizers are often torsion bars with a cylindrical cross section, which connect a right-hand and a left-hand suspension of a vehicle axle to one another. Tubes can also be employed. The central part of the roll or body roll stabilizer is connected, for example, to a vehicle body and the angled ends, which act as levers, are connected via rubber elements to the respective suspension elements, such as transverse links. The terms stabilizer, roll stabilizer or body roll stabilizer used in this description refer to the same component.
In considering a pair of wheels located at the same end of a vehicle, deflection of one wheel causes spring travel to be transmitted to the second wheel by twisting the roll stabilizer, which causes the second wheel to deflect as well. Similarly, during the rebound of one wheel, spring travel is transmitted in the same way to the other wheel, which causes the second wheel to rebound correspondingly. In this way, excessive roll or body roll of the vehicle body about the vehicle's longitudinal axis during cornering, is counteracted. During simultaneous deflection and rebound of both wheels, the stabilizer behaves neutrally.
The position of the roll stabilizer is determined substantially by components in the region of the vehicle floor, the drive train, the exhaust system, the engine/transmission unit, and the chassis parts. The actual arrangement of the stabilizer is therefore often a compromise between an optimum arrangement and an arrangement largely dictated by the geometric boundary conditions of the surrounding components.
For front-wheel-drive vehicles in particular, the installation space available for the suspension components is very greatly restricted because the engine and the transmission take up most of the available installation space. Furthermore, as the stabilizers are generally considered relatively late in the development process, the design of the stabilizers and the available installation space for mounting them are often subjected to tight constraints, which results in complicated designs and considerable compromises with regard to their kinematic behavior.
One possible solution, described in patent DE10253762A1 discloses a suspension system with roll compensation in which the deflecting and rebounding suspension elements of a vehicle axle are connected to one another by means of transmission elements via a device. The solution further proposes that a cable be looped in a figure-eight around two grooved-profile pulleys, wherein the grooved-profile pulleys are arranged concentrically with respect to a body-side pivot bearing of a link. The cable is fastened to the respective grooved-profile pulleys by means of a clamping device. Furthermore, the two arms of the cable are supported on spring elements. During reciprocal deflection and rebound of the wheels, the pivoting movement of respective links causes a rotational movement at the respective body-side pivot bearings and therefore at the grooved-profile pulleys associated with the bearings. This rotational movement is converted by means of the cable into a translatory movement, which is then transmitted onward via the spring elements as a rotational movement to the other grooved-profile pulley. During joint deflection of the wheels, the suspension of the vehicle is not impaired by the described device.
Another solution described in patent DE10253762A1 presents two Bowden cables, coupled to one another in series with a spring element and/or a damping element between the cables.